Relativity Announces Strategic Investment from Silver Lake

Global News

22
Mar
2021

Editor

Relativity announced a definitive agreement for a strategic growth investment from Silver Lake, the global leader in technology investing. The investment highlights Relativity’s compelling position in enterprise data solutions and will support Relativity’s mission to enable customers to organize data, discover the truth and act on it. 

Relativity is the industry leader in e-discovery software, with more than 300,000 annual users in 49 countries managing more than 145 billion files. Relativity’s customer base has been paramount to the company’s growth and is the driving force in leading the industry’s adoption of cloud-based e-discovery and artificial intelligence (AI), where Relativity software has been used to make billions of predictions on over 10 billion documents. In the past 12 months, the number of customers and amount of data under management more than doubled for its cloud product, RelativityOne. Relativity’s growth is also a result of its customers’ global expansion in order to solve some of world’s most difficult unstructured data challenges. RelativityOne is currently available across nine global geographies, with four more to be added in 2021.

Silver Lake’s strategic partnership is designed to help Relativity accelerate growth, innovation and technology differentiation. Moreover, it will allow the company to devote even more resources to its AI-powered communication surveillance platform, Relativity Trace. Relativity Trace is used by compliance teams at some of the largest global financial institutions and corporations to proactively detect regulatory misconduct like insider trading, collusion and other non-compliant behavior to help protect against financial and reputational damage. The partnership will also support ongoing global expansion and reinforce recent major investments in its cloud technology across the EMEA and APAC regions. As part of the transaction, ICONIQ Growth will remain a key investor. Representatives of Silver Lake also will join the company’s Board of Directors.

"Silver Lake is one of the most respected voices in technology, and their investment in Relativity signifies their confidence in our commitment to innovate and deliver best-in-class technology across the industries we serve,” said Mike Gamson, Chief Executive Officer at Relativity. “We are fortunate to welcome Silver Lake as our new partner and look forward to their participation on our Board of Directors. This partnership will help us continue to build upon our strong foundation with our dynamic global community of users, customers and partners as we carry out our mission and drive the industry forward." 

“Relativity is not only the clear leader in software for the legal sector, but also an increasingly strategic company in enterprise technology generally, as proliferating data across multiple formats both on-premise and in the cloud need to be collected and analyzed for a wide range of compliance purposes,” said Joe Osnoss, Managing Partner of Silver Lake. “Our investment is designed to accelerate the realization of Relativity’s potential in partnership with the talented management and employees, founder Andrew Sieja and our colleagues from ICONIQ Growth.”

Silver Lake’s strategic partnership with Relativity is also expected to help the company accelerate its offerings to law firms where 198 of the Am Law 200 use Relativity and 168 of the Am Law 200 use RelativityOne. In addition, the partnership is intended to help expedite the extension of Relativity’s offerings to its global network of service providers, as well as corporate and government customers, who continue to broaden the types of problems they solve with Relativity’s technology. Corporations leverage RelativityOne for internal investigations, data subject access requests, third-party subpoenas, incident response and a number of other unstructured data challenges. In addition, Relativity recently launched RelativityOne Government, its FedRAMP authorized cloud-based offering, to work with its government customers responding to cloud mandates and rising needs associated with litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests. 

Qatalyst Partners acted as financial advisor to Relativity. Reed Smith LLP acted as legal advisor to Relativity. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP acted as legal advisor to Silver Lake.